The phenomena of pain and pleasure haunt moral philosophy. The most naïve view is that pain is bad and pleasure good. Less naïve views allow for bad pleasures and good pains. But I want to stay for a while with the naïve view, dig into it a bit and ask: What’s so bad about pain? And what’s so good about pleasure? Here is my undeveloped suggestion with regard to pain: Pain is bad, among other things, because pain can make meaning disappear. Pain can confine us to ourselves and either make everything look meaningless or make it impossible for us to see anything else accept the pain itself—sometimes this comes to the same thing. The thought that this might be the case occurred to me once in the shower. I was probably thinking about something when a shampoo bottle fell on my toe. It was as if time stopped for a moment or two. I could not think of anything else. It was as if my mind was extracted from my body. Nothing else existed in my world. I was completely absorbed in the pain, in my toe. The pain was my world. I was my toe. (An excellent discussion of closely related issues—in particular of how pain can isolate, perhaps even create a kind of logical isolation—can be found in Karen Fiser’s “Privacy and Pain.” Also important in this connection is Jean Amery’s discussion of torture in At the Mind’s Limits.) Now, there is a claim to be made for the idea that we have a duty to find meaning in things. So, for example, it would be a deep moral failing—a deep blindness—to fail to find any significance in the fact that one has become a parent. We don’t only have a duty here. We have a strong natural tendency to find certain things meaningful—it is part of what being human is. It comes out in the fact that we keep pictures in our wallets, that we can feel sorry for a trampled flower; it certainly comes out in our tendency to look at ambiguous pictures, and try to see what is in them—imagine. We, humans, are compelled to do it sometimes; but this is not the kind of thing a dog or an elephant would to. And when we fail sometimes to find things meaningful—this can be comical or horrible—the failure is a blemish on our very humanity. It is the same kind of odd blindness we find sometimes in Bentham or Hume. The latter, for instance, asks in his essay on Suicide:It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel? We want to slap some sense into the writer of those words: The person in this example is not “turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel.” Nor are they spilling some blood on the floor; they are committing suicide for crying out loud! If indeed such duty exists to find things meaningful, then pain has a tendency to undermine it. It can suck the value out of things, and make their significance vanish. The whole structure of a human life can crumble in the face of pain. Pain may prevent us from seeing. In the presence of pain we may only be able to see as a Hume would: meaningless insignificant facts. Pain, that is, can have the same blinding effect on us as moral-intellectual laziness, or as some abuses of empiricism and utilitarianism. By the way, in the spirit of this suggestion, it is possible to say that if pleasure is any good, it is so, among other things, because and insofar as it can open our eyes to things beyond us: Pleasure is good because it can be a flashlight that reveals to us something significant, or even meaning that we could not have fathomed before.

We are naturally inclined to treat pains (and sensations, and feelings in general) as private objects “in” the soul. This talk is confused, because we don’t really have a logical mechanism in which the pain could really function as an object. No conceptual scheme to support this. For example, we don’t have anywhere in which to place the pain. If pain were an object, this should have been possible; and since it is not possible, it logically undermines the idea that pains are objects: it shows (at least one part of) the nonsensicality of this idea. However, even after realizing this, we don’t give up. We talk of pain being in the body—in my toe, for example, after I stubbed it against the table. But the pain is not “in the toe” in the same way that there is blood in the toe. So where is it, then? We try to outsmart ourselves: We talk of pains as being “in” the brain. But it is not my brain that feels pain, but me (in the toe). —

Pains are soul-ly. They are not part of the matter of us, they are part of our form—our soul—and so they refuse to be contained in our brain. Pain is not “in the body”; rather, pain is a certain kind of life the body may have. For instance, pain is the meaning of some behavior; it is not something that is there in addition to behavior.

Learning (remembering) to think about pain as a form of embodiment can have a remarkable relaxing effect on the philosopher-of-mind’s mind-muscles. It shows us where to look, it soothes the relevant thought-cramps. It is the kind of thing that shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. And I’m not saying it is easy to learn this: For one thing, pain is more obviously the form of some behavior than it is the form of embodiment of someone who keeps perfectly quiet and still. There are also difficulties connected to the differences between the ways in which this form of embodiment feels from a first-person and from a third-person perspective.

Now, even if we can learn to see pain as a form of embodiment, it will not completely eradicate the natural inclination to treat pains (and sensations, and feeling, and experiences in general) as objects; what could? What it does to that inclination is allow us to put it in perspective; it allows us to rethink this inclination, to put it in its proper place. In particular it allows us to put the inclination to treat pains and sensations as mental objects alongside the idea of them as forms of certain actions, behaviors, dispositions, and so on: to view the idea and the inclination in light of each other, and explore the relations between them.

More needs to be said both about the idea and about the inclination. But I’m now more interested in the inclination. The inclination to treat pains and sensations as objects is not just an inclination; it is a justified inclination—even if the justification is of no ordinary type. It is an inclination that is shared by all of us, despite contrasting grammatical commitments, and the reason why it is shared is that it captures the face—the aspect—that pains and sensations have for us.

Sensations and pains feel as if they have an independent existence: they seem like detachable pieces of our mind. Some thoughts that force themselves on us are like that too. We can have relations with them: entertain them, ignore them, be surprised by them, reject them, suspect them, endorse them, and so on. We want to capture a distinction between them and us—between our representations and the “I think” that always accompanies them. Perhaps even, sometimes, we don’t like the fact that the kind of existence these sensations and pains have is in us, through us: that they materialize through us, that they wear us like clothes. – This whole discussion can be taken as a partial answer to the hard problem of consciousness—at least when the problem is formulated in this way: ‘How can pains be objects, when they don’t have the grammar of objects?’

Now, if pains and sensations are truly forms of embodiment, if it is confused to think of them as objects “in” our soul, why do we still have such a strong inclination to think that? – A partial answer might be this: Perhaps this is the face that pains and sensations sometimes have for us, at least partly because, and to the extent that, we have them despite ourselves. We are passive with regard to our sensations; we are not their agents. We don’t sense or feel pain at will. And yet we enact them. We embody them. Perhaps this is why—this is how—it can become strange that they can be the form of our actions and dispositions: It makes it possible for us to get ourselves into a mindset from which this seems genuinely surprising: “How can something be the form of my behavior (pain behavior) while I’m passive with regard to it?”

Some questions:

1. Is the inclination to see pains and sensations as detachable objects a manifestation of the inclination we have sometimes to experience the limits of language as limitations, or might it sometimes be? By maintaining this inclination, are we expressing dissatisfaction with the very conditions that make it possible for us to make pains intelligible for ourselves in the first place?

2. Relatedly, is the inclination surmountable? Do we only experience it when we are in a philosophical mood—is it perhaps so by definition?

3. To the extent that the inclination to regard pains and sensations as objects is justified, does this tell us what pains and sensations are? Or does it merely reveal our attitude towards them? Is the description I gave of the attitude we have to pains, as reflected by the inclination to treat them as objects, is it correct only to the extent that it strikes a chord?

4. Might the idea of pain as a form of behavior, a form of embodiment more generally, although different from the inclination to see pains as objects, yet nourish from it? (Might this be part of the truth of the inclination somehow?) Are there elements of this form of embodiment—primarily perhaps the elements related to pain being forced on us—that not only give rise to the inclination to see pains as objects, but which cannot be accounted for except by employing the language of objects?

5. Two questions in connection with self-knowledge:

a. Is it part of what we need to do if we are to obey the Delphic imperative to know ourselves: to own our mental life, to accept it—not as ours, but as us? That is, are we to accept our pains and sensations and thoughts and wishes and knowledge and so on as the forms of our actions and dispositions and so on, and not as something we have relations with?

b. Is it another part of the task to accept that the principles of some of what we do, disposed to do, intend to do, and so on, are forced on us—that we are constantly forced to enact things despite ourselves?

Didactically, a problematic strategy of explaining the Wittgensteinian position with regard to the relation between pain and pain-behavior is to begin with being skeptical of the possibility of having pain sensation without any outward signs. The problem with this is that if you then try to say that the outward signs are a criterion for pain, not a mere symptom, you will be too late. For the connection between pain and pain behavior already looks external.

A better way to go is to first mention the internal connection between pain and having a body. For although pain without behavior sounds like something that makes perfect sense, pain without a body is a puzzling idea. The connection looks internal. The idea is that thinking about being embodied cannot be completely severed from the forms which this embodiment takes—pain being one of them, movement being another, behavior being yet another.

At bottom, pain is the form (in the Aristotelian sense) of certain types of behavior (and not, for instance, the form of a certain kind of movement), and to explain the Wittgensteinian view requires making forms visible, or, what comes to the same thing, showing, getting people to see, the symbols in the sings.